Nvidia Pays Poolside $6B to License Its 'Model Factory' and Hires 109 of the People Who Built It
r/LocalLLaMA (via The Information / Newcomer / Techmeme)·high signal
Poolside told investors Nvidia agreed to a non-exclusive $6 billion license for the Model Factory system it used to train its Laguna open model, plus job offers to 109 employees who worked on it, and a separate $1 billion investment at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The letter, first reported by Newcomer and The Information on August 20, insists this is neither an acquisition nor an acquihire, and the three cofounders stay. It follows the same structure Nvidia used with Groq ($20B) and Enfabrica ($900M), and it makes the largest GPU vendor a direct competitor to its own model-building customers.